This is a short and sweet mystery visual novel. I had a great time with it. I have a soft spot for enclosed settings, and a school in the middle of a forest after dark is the perfect place for some spooky goings-on. Definitely give it a shot. There will be spoilers near the end of this review.
The art, the music and the voice acting are solid, as usual. The Photoshop filter photo backgrounds aren't a good fit, but for the rest, it's a nice looking VN. The intro is a banger. A small bug can occur if you click through text quickly where some letters appear faded (most likely by having their fade in animation interrupted), but this is pretty harmless.
There are 7 well realized endings. Each ending is pretty distinct, and the bad endings are fairly elaborate. Some of the bad endings do... end, very suddenly, usually right before something terrible happens. It can be a bit anticlimactic. There are 3 "proper" endings, but there's definitely an easy winner for best one (it's the ending called An Old Memory). However, if you want the complete picture, you'll have to see them all. I was worried that this might be the kind of game where your choices actually change the "reality" of the story, but this is generally not true. The one exception is the The Seven Mysteries, the earliest bad ending you can get, where a certain character (Rio) is VERY different. If you know, you know.
The writing is generally good, but the localization suffers from some common issues - it's mostly down to gratuitous swearing. The weird part is that there are long stretches of clean dialogue, then suddenly the main character gets back into swearing like a sailor repeatedly (which obviously is absent in the Japanese voices). This makes me wonder if multiple people worked on it. There are some spelling errors as well. But since there are no cringy memes or weird political references, I guess it can be called a decent localization on average.
The overall story is strong, especially in its layered nature. Is it a supernatural mystery? A murder mystery? A sci-fi mystery? It has shades of all three. I do feel that some parts weren't explained very well.
SPOILER WARNING.
About the idea of trapping the students in school after hours, all as an extension of this memory suppressing drug trial. We don't get a very clear view of how they organize that and why they have to do it exactly like that (other people have just been killed off in the past, so this just seems like a lot of trouble). One moment, the students are at the festival, then they're alone in an abandoned school with no sign of the festival ever happening. Do the other students just... leave the knocked out students there? It's implied that there would be evening celebrations for the festival, but at 17:00, the school is totally deserted aside from our characters. It's a bit odd.
On the best ending route, Sumika is stabbed by Itsuki. However, in her own route, she wields supernatural powers and even kills Itsuki. I guess Itsuki took her by surprise, but still, it feels a bit off. Also, Sumika totally disappears from the story after she gets killed, and you don't find out more about her unless you do her ending as well. In general, I'm a bit sad there's no closure for her, especially after you find out what's really going on with her. She deserved a lot better than what she got.
It's never completely explained why Ayana becomes scared of dolls after her parents' death. Reading between the lines, perhaps it's because the dolls were presents from her parents, and because Sumika's spirit "possessed" the doll in some way - or at least, the doll became aware somehow. Still, this might've been worth elaborating on.
Those are some lingering thoughts I had, but overall, I had a really great time with this game. I definitely recommend it for mystery fans.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/494170/Miniature_Garden/